Microsoft will pay Novell USD 348 million up front, but Novell will return USD 200 million of that amount over five years. The specific numbers came in an a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made by Novell late Tuesday. "The financial commitments Microsoft is making as part of this agreement are significant," company CEO Ron Hovsepian said in a statement. In related news, Microsoft has denied that its patent deal with Novell is in breach of the GPL or will automatically spread Microsoft's patent protection to other Linux distributions.

That's how the GPL-haters are painting it, yes. In reality, there are clear paths to complying with the spirit of the GPL which MS are not taking. So of course they are getting heat from "the open source community" who, of course, use Linux because it is a viable open source solution.

There are those who have always spread the FUD that "you can't make money off open source Linux", despite the fact that Redhat et al. have been doing that for years - BUT Novell seemingly haven't been able to.

Now, tell me, is that because of a problem with open source or because of a problem with Novell?

So now they go to MS and together they say "yes - you can make money from open source! By making it proprietary!" It's AT&T Sys III all over again.

As for openSUSE, if they make a clear statement that they will do what they can to prevent any code involved in the deal getting into openSUSE (and thus possibly infecting other Linux distros), then I will be the first to switch back. But I will NOT use them if I see them as a backdoor to get MS-patented code into Linux and thereby stop the whole show.